


Chicken Soup For The Soul

by disasteratsea



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fluff, Short One Shot, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 03:31:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5318807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasteratsea/pseuds/disasteratsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve spent a lot of his life being sick, so he knows sometimes you need someone to take care of you, even if you're Natasha and you don't really need taking care of. It's just nice, to have someone there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chicken Soup For The Soul

**Author's Note:**

> I actually finished one of the gazillion things I started, yay. It's not edited, fair warning.

It’s not all fighting aliens and rescuing hostages from terrorist cells – working for Shield that is. There’s training and research and the dreaded paper work. It takes time to set up missions, it’s not like they can just send in a Strike team without intel or a plan. So Steve has a lot of downtime between missions.

He spends a lot of it playing catch up with the world, checking items off his list; it was recommended he take up a hobby, so he signed up for a cooking class and an art class. It’s still not enough to keep him completely occupied, so he runs laps around the Mall and goes for long rides on his Harley.

He gets antsy sometimes, with so much free time. The thing is that Steve feels a little lost sometimes, he doesn’t know where he fits in the world anymore. Everything’s different except for the things that should be (they all thought that his war would be the last) and he’s had trouble adjusting.

When he gets called in for a mission after two weeks of leave Steve’s body sags with relief, because this is something he knows. He looks forward to missions. He likes to feel useful, he likes to help people, he’s comfortable doing missions, and he gets along with the Strike team he was assigned to – which includes the Black Widow, they work well together. Steve likes Natasha, she talks to him like a person where a lot of people tiptoe around him, she tells bad jokes and tries to set him up with everyone she can think of. It’s hard to tell with Natasha, but she lets him call her Nat and he knows where she lives and she's always lending him stuff like it's not a big deal, so he thinks he can call her his friend.

Maybe a work friend, but still, Steve’s more comfortable around her than with anybody else, so he looks forward to seeing her for missions.

So he’s a little disappointed when he gets on the quinjet where the team is already waiting and she isn’t there.

“Hi.” He says politely to the agent that’s taken her place.

“Hi yourself, Captain.” The woman greets back.

“Where’s Romanoff?” he asks after a brief, albeit uncomfortable silence on his part. It’s not that he has a problem working with another agent, it’s just that he’s never not worked with Nat, and she’s never been late before, so he’s concerned. Had she been reassigned? Surely someone would have told him.

“Nat’s out sick.” The woman explains, whipping her blonde hair over her shoulder “She asked me to fill in. Agent Morse.”

Agent Morse was personally selected by Natasha, who she refers to with the familiarity of a friend, as her temporary replacement, so it’s no surprise that she’s a competent agent.  She wastes no time in reaching the objective, cuts no corners and takes no shit from the men they were sent to detain.

The mission goes off without a hitch and they’re back in DC by the afternoon, which leaves Steve alone with all of that free time again.

 

 

He’s been to her apartment a few times, enough to know that Natasha lives off of take out and junk food. She’s too busy for cooking, she had said easily when he mentioned the leftover take out containers in her fridge and the menus near the phone in the kitchen.

It’s decorated like a room in a furniture magazine would be, he has the sneaking suspicion that that’s exactly how she had chosen her furniture: looked at a room in a catalogue and made hers to match. He gets the impression it’s more a place to sleep than a home. No photos on the walls and no personal touches that say who lives there. It doesn’t stop her from telling him his apartment is empty or boring or exactly what she’d expect from an old man. ( _What, no plastic on the furniture?_ she had asked the first time she had been there.)

He doesn’t think she actually spends much time at her apartment.

She’s there now though, answering the door in leggings and a loose sweater and her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She looks miserable and this was possibly a bad idea. He might be crossing a line, it’s hard to tell with Natasha, who changes the rules whenever she feels like it and doesn’t bother to tell him.

God, this was a mistake, a terrible, awkward mistake. It’s one thing to know where she lives, to visit when she insists he has to see this movie or borrow that book _now_ , another entirely to show up unannounced when she sick.

Natasha doesn’t like for people to see her as anything less that terrifyingly proficient. Right now she’s got a throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a dazed frown.

“Steve?” She says, clearly congested and repeating herself.

“Oh.” He hadn’t even realized she’d said anything before. “I uh, I brought you soup.”

And other stuff too: lozenges and juice and some truly disgusting cough syrup that purports to really work, among other things, anything and everything he thought she could use or might help, because Steve spent a lot of his life being sick and he knows how much it sucks and he knows what helps and what doesn’t. Including having someone there with you.

“You brought me soup?” Natasha asks and invites him in, she sounds so small and confused and Steve says “I made you soup” and reaches his hand out to her forehead to check her temperature. He makes a tutting sound with his tongue, she’s got a fever. “Go lie down.” He orders as seriously as if they were on a mission. “I’ll make you some tea. Are you hungry?”

Natasha grudgingly does as he says, shuffling over on the hardwood floor to curl up on the couch, and Steve goes to the kitchen and puts his things away while he waits for the kettle to boil. He takes a peak in the fridge and – yep, just as he though – there’s nothing in there but leftover Thai and beer. He’s willing to bet the pantry is just instant ramen and cookies.

When he gets back to Natasha with a try of tea and soup with crackers she’s balled up on the couch with a movie playing. “What are we watching?”

She lifts the blanket away from her face so that he can hear her. “Singing in the Rain” she answers as he sets the tray down on the coffee table.

She watches him sit on the other end. “Haven’t seen it.”

“Well you are in for a treat, Captain.” She sounds a little more like herself, crumbling crackers into the soup and smiling. Honestly he expected her to be watching something with less singing, but by now he thinks he should know better than to expect things; Natasha is always doing the unexpected. So he files this away: Likes Musicals, in the place in his mind where he keeps all the things he knows about her.

“Did you really make this?” She asks after she’s eaten her second bowl of chicken noodle soup. He nods, a little proud of himself because, yes, he is a damn fine cook. She pushes him lightly “shut up,” she says “you’re going to have to cook for me all the time now, you know that right?”

Steve lets out the most tired, put upon, sigh that he can manage without laughing, but ruins it by smiling. “Well God knows you can’t cook for yourself.” Natasha pretends to be offended. “Seriously, how are you even still alive? A grown woman that can’t even scramble an egg.”

Natasha sits up, shoving some of the blanket away so that she can move her arms more freely. “Listen, buddy, you are on very thin ice.” She pokes him in the chest and grins, along with old man jokes, Natasha likes to tease him with ice jokes. (Stay Frosty, she likes to say on the job.) “I’ll have you know that I make damned good scrambled eggs.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.” He says with a smile before stealing half of the blanket for himself.

They settle back into the movie for Gene Kelly’s famous dance number and Natasha sighs with her head pillowed against his side. His arm is wrapped around her like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Natasha says something about how warm he is and wiggles closer so that there’s no space between them. Gene smiles, all straight teeth and charm, swinging around the lamppost and tossing his umbrella away; a man in love. “I used to dance.” She says quietly. If he wasn’t who he was he might not have heard her speak at all.

“Used to?”

“Before. In Russia.” _Oh_ , he thinks, not knowing what to say. She’s never mentioned anything about her life before Shield to him. “A long time ago.”

He wonders if she means professionally, or just for fun, if it was a particular type of dance, if she means she doesn’t dance at all anymore.

She sounds like she misses it.

“I’ve never danced.” He offers because it’s all he has.

Natasha rolls over so that she’s looking up at him. A skeptical look on her face. “You mean you’ve never, not once in your very long life, danced?”

He shrugs as if to say _oh well, what can you do_. He doesn’t want to tell her about Peggy and missing their date. His chest feels tight thinking about it. But Natasha pulls him out of it.

“I’ll teach you.” She says gently, knowing it’s a painful subject for him, she seems to always know these things. “ _If_ ” she adds “you keep cooking for me.”

“Really?” he says, all traces of melancholy gone from the conversation, just like that.

“Exchange of goods and services, Rogers.”

Fair enough, he thinks, he would have cooked for her anyway. He always liked to share meals with people, joking around and enjoying good food together. It would be nice to have that again. He does _try_ to adjust.

Natasha throws an arm around his middle and finds the most comfortable way to position the rest of her body, stretching out and curling back up against his side, much like a cat searching for warmth in the crook of a persons arm. He can hear her singing quietly along to the movie, her breathing growing heavy with sleep. For some time Steve plays with the bits of Natasha’s hair that have come loose.

On screen the credits roll and Steve lets them, not wanting to move Natasha, who looks more at ease than he’s ever seen her awake. He’ll have to make more soup for her, maybe he can try making borscht.

When she wakes up Natasha decides that next time he’ll get to choose the movie. Because there’s going to be a next time, she’s decided. That’s alright with Steve, he’s got a list to work on and plenty of free time, it’ll be nice to have someone to share it with.

 

 

 


End file.
